In 2009 I requested the phone records for the Small Business Administration (SBA) Press Office Director Mike Stamler. I wound up in the United States Supreme Court. The Supreme Court refused to hear my case and Mike Stamler’s phone records remained secret.

What in the world was in Mike Stamler’s phone records that the SBA was willing to go to the U.S. Supreme Court to keep secret?

Yasser Al-Zahrani was twenty-one years-old when he died at Guantanamo Bay. The US military claims he, along with two other prisoners, committed suicide in their cells. However, a new document uncovered by journalist Scott Horton and published by Harper’s Magazine strongly suggests that they were killed at a CIA black site prison.

The war in Vietnam essentially began in 1964 in response to what the American government claimed was an unprovoked attack upon two U.S. naval ships, the destroyers USS Maddox (DD-731) and USS Turner Joy (DD-951), while they were steaming peacefully on the high seas in the Gulf of Tonkin off Vietnam. Although there was a U.S. military presence in Vietnam before that, the Tonkin events led to congressional action which allowed President Lyndon Johnson (and, later, President Richard Nixon) to escalate our military presence enormously and to wage war not only in Vietnam but also covertly in Southeast Asia.

Among the many books written on the Vietnamese war, half a dozen note a 1967 letter to the editor of a Connecticut newspaper which was instrumental in pressuring the Johnson administration to tell the truth about how the war was started.

Mother Jones Magazine has uncovered a new twist in the fight against the Keystone XL pipeline. As it turns out, the authors who drafted the environmental review of the Keystone XL pipeline worked for Transcanada, Koch Industries, Shell Oil, and other oil corporations that stand to benefit from building the Keystone XL. Not only did the State Department know about these conflicts of interest, they redacted this information from public filings in attempt to conceal the truth.

Today’s news will be dominated with Bush’s admission that Cheney was mad at him for not pardoning Libby. As the press is distracted with a rehashing of the successful cover-up of one of Bush’s crimes, we ought to remember that today marks the successful cover-up of a more horrible crime.

The AP story on the Salt Pit death makes it clear that–at a time when Dusty Foggo was Executive Director of CIA–he was involved in an internal review of the death. He also received incredible levels of protection during his last two years at CIA, protection that probably goes beyond what you’d expect of his senior position. With each new detail of his involvement in the torture program, it seems more and more likely that that protection extended at least in part from the role he played in covering up torture.